A grim night at LA's last Hard Rock Cafe, where music memories go to die

Less than 30 minutes into dinner at the Hard Rock Cafe on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles - the last iteration of the once-popular chain of music-themed restaurants in Southern California - no fewer than three team members asked my boyfriend and me where we were visiting from. They were dumbfounded when we answered that we live about 15 minutes away.

After all, beleaguered Hollywood Boulevard is ground zero for tourists, especially at the Hard Rock's location inside the Hollywood and Highland shopping and dining complex, steps away from the old Grauman's Chinese Theatre. Outside, vendors peddle souvenirs and sunglasses, and a man with a python around his neck shills for photographs. The Walk of Fame, with stars for beret-donning actor John Travolta and Guns n' Roses guitarist Slash, is underfoot. 

Although the restaurant was busier than I expected it to be on a weeknight, mostly with families who no doubt were staying nearby or visiting for the World Cup, the Hard Rock of today felt nothing like it did during its heyday. As a Gen Xer, I came of age in the era of themed restaurants - and perhaps none was cooler than the Hard Rock Cafe, which by the mid-1990s was a thriving chain filled with ephemera from the biggest musicians from the 1960s onward. Think: Madonna's dress from the "Like a Virgin" video and John Lennon's handwritten lyrics to "Imagine."

Back then, having a piece of Hard Rock merch was like owning one of Taylor Swift's guitar picks. I, for one, had a Hard Rock pin and a menu from a visit to the London Hard Rock during middle school that I kept on a bulletin board in my bedroom until I graduated from high school. Although I was decidedly uncool growing up, those trinkets made me feel worldly.

Although the Hard Rock Cafe on Hollywood Boulevard has been open only since 2010, it feels of another time - but still less colorful or dynamic than the ones I remember visiting in my youth. 

A rockin' history

Founded by two Americans, Isaac Tigrett and Peter Morton, the first Hard Rock Cafe opened as an American-style diner in an abandoned Rolls-Royce dealership in London in 1971. It was named after a Los Angeles dive bar of the same name visited by musicians like Jim Morrison. Artist Alan Aldridge, who had worked with the Beatles, designed the now-iconic circular yellow logo to resemble a car's hood ornament. 

Although Paul McCartney and Wings played an impromptu concert at the Hard Rock in 1973, it wasn't until 1979 that the cafe started to showcase the musical memorabilia it's become famous for over the decades, starting with Eric Clapton's guitar, which the restaurant hung over a bar stool to save his seat.

The brand's first U.S. location opened at LA's Beverly Center mall in 1982, complete with a classic Cadillac on the roof and a star-studded opening party attended by Brat Pack-ers, chef Wolfgang Puck and musicians like Neil Young. During the 1980s, the brand went through a major international expansion phase, opening in cities all over the world.

Here in Los Angeles, the Hard Rock of the 1980s was, to put it mildly, a scene. 

"At 7:45 p.m. on a chilly night, the line outside the Beverly Center already spills around the corner," wrote the late Los Angeles Times critic Jonathan Gold in a 1989 review of the Beverly Center location. "Half a dozen taxicabs wait a few feet away, ready to cart off anybody giddy from too many Long Island Ice Teas, and with nearly the regularity of trams in the Disneyland parking lot, rented Mustangs pull up to the curb and disgorge young men in Porsche jackets and tight jeans."

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By then, the brand's logo-emblazoned T-shirts had also become a status symbol, making it one of the first highly coveted pieces of now-ubiquitous restaurant merch. In the 1990s, Hard Rock started to branch out into hotels with the opening of a hotel and casino in Paradise, Las Vegas, just off the Strip, in 1995. (The hotel's rowdy "Rehab" pool parties became infamous in the mid-aughts, although the property would ultimately close in 2020.)

In 1996, the company was purchased by Rank Group, which brought the hotels and restaurants under one roof. Casino operators the Seminole Tribe of Florida purchased Hard Rock in 2007, later debuting the world's first guitar-shaped hotel in Hollywood, Florida, in 2019.

Today, Hard Rock International operates more than 40 hotels and 160 restaurants around the world and hosts 35,000 musical performances annually. The company owns 87,000 pieces of memorabilia, including iconic items like Elvis Presley's gold leaf piano. 

As the parent company has continued to shutter Hard Rock Cafes over the years, the focus remains on hotels and casinos: By all accounts, the just-opened Hard Rock Casino Tejon, at the base of the Grapevine on Interstate 5, is a smashing success, and a new guitar-shaped Hard Rock Casino and Hotel is in the works at the site of the former Mirage in Las Vegas. (There's also a Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Sacramento, and San Francisco still has its own Hard Rock Cafe on Pier 39.)

The Hard Rock Cafe today

The Hard Rock at the Beverly Center closed in 2006. The Hollywood Boulevard location opened in a former 20,000-square-foot Virgin Megastore in 2010. As with most themed restaurants, diners enter through a sprawling gift shop offering, yes, those iconic Hard Rock Cafe tees, but also hats, sweatshirts and items like soccer jerseys for a collab with soccer star Lionel Messi. The cavernous dining room, outfitted with a stage, feels drab and corporate thanks to stark overhead fluorescent lighting and nondescript tables, although there's a neon sign over the kitchen that reads the brand's slogan, "Love All Serve All," which dates back to 1971.

I remember feeling more surrounded by memorabilia in the Hard Rock Cafe visits of my past. Here, most of the items are housed behind glass around the perimeter of the dining room, giving the place a museum-like feel. One case houses a shirt worn by Brian Wilson during the "Pet Sounds" era. A drum set from Metallica's Lars Ulrich hangs in a hallway on the way to the restrooms. A small shrine to Guns n' Roses features an American flag-themed jacket worn by Axl Rose and one of Slash's acoustic guitars. A hip-hop room has a pair of Reebok Pump high-tops, another relic of the past, worn by MC Hammer.

All in all, it feels less immersive than the Hard Rocks of my memory - and maybe even a little sad. After all, there's something macabre about looking at a pair of drab black jeans worn by Jim Morrison during a Doors performance at the Hollywood Bowl. If anything, it's a reminder of his short life and unfortunate ending. (Some of the clothing, including the jeans and a pair of leather pants worn by the legendary Frank Zappa, now also just gives me the ick, having spent years encased in glass.)

The experience feels akin to going back to your high school as an adult: The hallways that once seemed so vast and vibrant suddenly feel so much smaller and more muted. But of course, the space hasn't changed. You have.

The Hard Rock also harkens back to a time when rock stars were, well, stars. In today's ever-deepening cesspool of fame - in which jilted reality TV personalities and influencers with a controversial catchphrase easily earn their 15 minutes - the concept of notoriety has become much more diluted. I wonder if younger visitors to the Hard Rock even know who, say, Debbie Harry or Joe Walsh is.

Of course, it being a restaurant, there's food and drinks to be had. Sweet cocktails do indeed include those Long Island iced teas made with Coca-Cola, plus a lavender-hued bourbon mule and a few options made with blue Curacao, the ultimate marker of "I'm on vacation" vibes. The food is mostly of the pub grub variety: fried appetizer platters, a perfectly decent smash burger and "famous" fajitas that continue sizzling for several minutes after being placed on the table. While seating us, the host espoused the joys of a few new menu items, like the "dessert nachos," tortilla chips topped with scoops of ice cream and drizzled with sauces.

The Hard Rock Cafe isn't without its charms, though. As part of a weekly Tuesday open-mic night on the stage, an older songstress wearing sparkly tights and cowboy boots warbled through a Joni Mitchell song on her acoustic guitar. The staff was friendly and chatty, and the tourists who were there looked like they were having a good time as they dug into their wings and baby back ribs while music videos played on the TV screens scattered around the dining room.

But unlike the recent rash of resurgent, purposefully kitchy spaces like Barney's Beanery or Dave & Buster's, there seems to be little hope for the Hard Rock Cafe to reclaim all its former glory - at least in a setting like this. Just outside the tinted windows that run along Hollywood Boulevard, next to the large El Capitan Theatre marquee, is the office and studio space for Jimmy Kimmel, who has become one of the last late-night hosts standing, despite coming under repeated fire by President Donald Trump. 

Just up the street, an angry, meme-fueled collection of homeowners has been loudly fighting public restrooms at a busy local park, pitting neighbor against neighbor, while LA's failed mayoral candidate Rick Caruso calls on local politicians to rid the community of homeless people lest local restaurant institution Musso & Frank Grill close (ownership says it's doing fine). Not even the beleaguered breastaurant Hooters could survive here, on one of the most touristed blocks in America.

The Los Angeles Hard Rock Cafe is a faded promise of a happy, cool place that hasn't existed in years, if it ever really did. Without context or age, the restaurant might be a semi-suitable place for a middle-of-the-road meal; a little dated, yet who cares? But living 15 minutes away means that you get the whole failing picture - including the '80s rock revolution that started just miles away on the Sunset Strip and has now been reduced to a pair of disintegrating jeans encased in glass.

Hard Rock Cafe, 6801 Hollywood Blvd., Suite 105, Los Angeles. Open Monday through Thursday, 11 a.m. to 10 p.m., Friday, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m., Saturday, 10 a.m. to 11 p.m., Sunday, 10 a.m. to 10 p.m.

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